Rise Above, Golden Girl
by Copper Hikari
Summary: Mami Tomoe used to be the head of our class. All of a sudden, she moved to the back of the room. She stopped raising her hand, she stopped hanging out with her friends...and then, on my way back from work, I saw her about to jump off of the pier. I had to say something.


Rise Above, Golden Girl

…

Her blond curls danced in time to the sounds of the sea. The chilling breeze rushed through us and swayed our bodies like a constant cradle, rocking back and forth without ever stopping for air. Her ironed and impeccable high school uniform flowed in the moonlight, the fabric no doubt bombarded by saltwater from the crashing waves. I could barely see her right then, her body turned away and facing the moon as it hung high above us, like a constant bookmark to our unremarkable lives in Mitakihara Town.

I thought I had seen her before.

Maybe it was in a dream, or even a dream of a dream. Hey, for all I knew, it probably wasn't even the same girl I had in mind. But the blond princess that stood here was so similar to the one in my mind that it was uncanny, almost scarily so. Her smile was the first thing that clued me in: it always hung there, rain or shine or terminal tornado. It was almost like a lighthouse, if you don't mind me stretching the sea metaphor out again. No matter how sad you'd get, a look at that smile told you everything would be all right.

But ironically enough, as I stood there at the Mitakihara Beach Boardwalk in the middle of another spring night, she wasn't exactly in an uplifting situation.

Au contraire. She was leaning off of the rail of the pier, body leaning out into nothingness.

I didn't think that she had seen me, between the flashing lights of the ferris wheel behind us and the families leaving with screaming children, but when she turned her small head my way, the corner of her mouth curled up into that familiar smile. She turned back, almost as though she were debating talking to me. It must not have been a hard choice; she tilted back to me again almost instantly.

"If I jumped off," she started, "Do you think I could die?"

What kind of question was that? We were at least twenty feet up, _and _a good way out into the water. She couldn't be more than a hundred and twenty pounds or so; the small girl would go 'splat' upon impact. And from the way she said it, she _knew_ what would happen. She sounded like a pre-recording. As if she had asked herself this question a billion times already.

She turned back to the waves and leaned out a bit farther. Her hands started to go lax on the railing. I suddenly felt that if I didn't say anything, I would be an accomplice to suicide.

So, my mouth started flying. I said something, anything, to keep her focused on this side of the rail. "Of course you would," I started. "Anyone would. There's a reason that safety bar exists, and I don't think it's for you to cross it. You wouldn't come back up for air."

"You really think so?"

"You're only human," I slurred my words. Adrenaline started to race through my veins. I mean, regardless of whether or not I knew this kid, she was totally about to jump off of a ledge. How could I stop her? Was there anything I could do?

I fumbled across three different dialects of gibberish before she turned back to meet me. I finally got a look at her face; this was definitely the same girl that I thought it was. I knew her from school, as a matter of fact. She sat toward the front a few weeks ago and was top of her class. As recent as a week ago, she was sitting in the very back and hardly making an effort. The students asked behind closed doors why she became a different person overnight. The teachers pretended that she had never been a brilliant student in the first place. Those that fancied her their academic rival sort of moved on. They thought that she had just 'quit' working for a bright future.

I knew for a fact that that wasn't the case.

No, it wasn't for a 'fact'. I had a gut feeling. Nobody 'quits' on themselves, and I just knew that she wasn't the first person to try that.

It was just like I knew, without a doubt, that the girl hanging off of the pier railing was fourteen-year-old ninth-grader Mami Tomoe. I only knew it from the golden hair and the smile that never dimmed. Whatever light that used to take refuge in her eyes was long gone. It was as if someone had shut off a light switch. Like the change from dawn to dusk. Something was missing from her spirit.

"I wouldn't come up...I guess that's true," Mami sighed. She came closer to the rail now, leaning her body inward ever so slightly. Even with her feet firmly planted on the edge of the boardwalk, I still found it impossible to relax.

Before I could ask, she beat me to the obvious question. "What are you doing out here?"

"Um…I work here," I pointed to the red uniform. It was hard to think about myself. "It's a part-time gig."

"Oh. Where do you work?"

"The, uh…the hot dog place? Right by the roller coaster?"

"I _love_ that place," Mami tilted her head slightly, and then there was a pause. Was this really what she wanted to talk about? For one, I knew Mami had to be lying about the hot dogs. The meat was so hilariously low-grade, even calling it meat was probably an insult to slaughtered animals everywhere.

She opened her eyes wide. The fact that they were virtually dead inside just grew more eerily certain: it was like staring into a painting. The only difference between Mami Tomoe and the Mona Lisa was that the latter never looked directly at you (according to textbooks). I knew that Mami was looking right at me—I could feel her stare—but when I returned the stare, it didn't feel right.

I hated admitting it, but it felt like looking at a ghost.

"I know you from somewhere, don't I?" Mami asked in her trademark breathy voice. When she first became the star student, all of the other guys thought she talked like that as some kind of stunt to be popular and attractive. Don't get me wrong, it totally worked with the muscle-headed, football-playing part of class 3-A. If you were in our class, played on a sports team, and somehow _weren't_ in love with the blond and gorgeous Mami Tomoe, then you probably didn't exist. But after a while, we noticed she never slipped; her voice was always that light and fluffy. Her jubilant mood remained unstoppbale. Even after she migrated to the back of class and started to fall off the radar, in the few cases where she spoke up, it was in the same lovely way.

This is the part where I'm supposed to be shocked that she knew who I even was, but Mami Tomoe had a reputation for being crazy nice, too. My friend worked on a group project with her once, and whenever they saw each other outside of class, the two of them traded smiles. Mami was just like that. Her knowing everybody, if not by name then at least by face, was the status quo.

"I'm in your class," I said. It was becoming easier to talk to her, given the circumstances.

"I remember now! Your friend and I worked on that paper a while back," Mami smiled nostalgically.

Just when it looked like she might come back to the side of the living, Mami's attention darted back to the water. There was no way I was losing her again.

"I don't usually come by this way," I continued to ramble. "To get home from work, I mean. My shift ended a little while ago, but I have a little more change than I usually do, so I figured I could take the train home instead of walk the whole way. I know, what a climatic end to another great day, right?"

My attempt at self-deprecation worked: her attention had gravitated back my way. "I'm sure your day was more wonderful than you give it credit for," Mami sighed.

I'd never had a full conversation with her—not even a boring half-conversation, for that matter—but from the amount of friends she always surrounded herself with, I had to assume that this kind of talk wasn't just in her nature.

Mami's tight mouth hung slightly open for a second, and she shook herself back a second later. She must have been thinking so hard, she wound up seeing a 'now loading' screen or something.

And then Mami smiled at me.

"Hey."

A shiver burst up the length of my back, and then ran down the way it came.

"You can come closer if you want," Mami said, her smile growing bright with every syllable. It wasn't flirty at all. Her invitation was as casual as inviting someone to go out for an afternoon stroll. "The breeze is really nice."

I walked toward the railing without much thought. Don't ask me if it was me actually accepting the invitation or if it was me just trying to appease this blond potential-suicide-case, because I don't know how I would answer.

I rested my arms on the space next to her. Mami turned back around and linked her elbows around the railing. I couldn't be sure that the crisis was averted, but things suddenly felt defused, and by a long shot.

We stood there for a while, each of us admiring the coastal skyline. Mitakihara's one of those cities with light pollution up the ying-yang: our 'night' is basically a purple hue falling over a bunch of office buildings with their lights still on. The beach was the darkest part of the city, next to the suburbs a few miles out. So, the two of us gazed on the moon and the four or five stars that glistened against the violet horizon.

I was about to say something about my job when she interrupted me. Thankfully.

"The other kids at school," she started slowly. "They're talking about me, aren't they?"

I hoped that honesty was still the best policy. "Everyone's just worried about you."

"Because I stopped being who I used to be?"

What was that supposed to mean? She was still herself, but she just let her grades slip. "It's not every day the star student goes comatose," I said.

When she looked like she was internalizing this a bit too harshly, I started to back up. "But like I said, they're just worried about you." I took, excuse the phrase, a leap of faith. "And once you get over whatever's eating at you, I'm sure they'll go back to worshiping you. That's just a fact."

She giggled at the thought of having worshipers. It was funny how girls with fan clubs tend not to notice them. "Whatever's eating me," Mami echoed.

"Something's got to be getting at you. I can kinda tell."

"How?" She asked with a harsher infliction. A 'you don't know me' undercurrent was rampaging between us now. I thought hard about the right response.

"For starters? You're dangling off of a ledge," I added a morbid smile. "Call me crazy, but I don't think that's normal behavior for A students."

And thank whoever's up there, because Mami Tomoe grinned with me. I was almost sure she'd take that the wrong way, but Mami lived up to her reputation of being highly personable.

Mami turned away from the view now, leaning in toward solid ground. If we turned our heads, our faces would only be a few inches apart. Talk about luck. I might not be part of the Mami Tomoe fan club like the weightlifting bozos at school, but it's not like I'm _not_ a fifteen-year-old guy, either. The girl was gorgeous. There was no way to dance around it.

She opened her mouth once, twice, three times in a quest to say the right thing. I didn't mind; she didn't have to tell me a damn thing. I was just the guy that stumbled into her personal life. Anything Mami said was a gift, as far as I was concerned.

When she finally started talking again, she looked up and out, past me and probably more into herself than anything.

"They didn't make the announcement over the loudspeakers," Mami started slowly. "They wanted to, because they thought it might be easier if everyone knew what I was going through…but I said 'no'. It wouldn't have helped. There are just some things that you have to go through alone, I guess."

I didn't ask. From the way she was talking, I couldn't be sure if she was talking for me or for her.

"I guess you want to know what I'm going on about."

Well, this was ironic. "I didn't want to pry," I said.

"No, it's okay. I could use some company," Mami said.

"Fair enough. What are you going on about?"

There was another pause—

"There was an accident. About a week ago…a car accident. Did you read anything about it?"

I told her that there was no way I _couldn't_ have heard about it. It was all over the papers, the Internet, _and_ TV. Some rich guy's limo got totaled when it stopped short of getting through the intersection of Olympic and 14th. The truck driver went into full body traction, but the people in the limo were pronounced dead on impact. Olympic got shut down for the two days after—some auto parts smashed against the surrounding buildings—and once the mess was cleared up, the world went back onto its scheduled program.

"There's no way to dance around it, so I should probably come out and say it."

Her face wrenched, from some emotion that was bothering her enough to debate jumping from the pier. "If you don't feel comfortable telling me—"

"I was in that limo."

She took a breath.

"My parents and I. We were late for the opera, and Dad sped through the intersection. The light wasn't red yet, but it still felt dangerous. And just when it felt like everything was going to be okay, and car was stopped on the other side of the intersection…

"I've never told anyone that," she said quietly. "It's the first time I've heard it out loud. My parents are dead...

"My parents are dead."

I had a few different reactions running through my head, so I should probably go through them in chronological order.

At first, I couldn't help but feel like I'd just stuck my arm elbow-deep in crazy. Then, I felt horrible for thinking that because this girl lost her parents. _Then_ I realized that she had to be mad rich, but _then_ I noticed how much this didn't matter. Mami Tomoe, guy-magnet and bona fide rich girl, was looking a lot less than chipper.

"Your friends haven't asked about..?"

"They all know," Mami said, "And it's not like they're there for me, but…"

"Say no more," I waved my hand. When she looked a little puzzled, I continued. "It's one of those things that you can't explain, and people who haven't gone through it can't help because they don't know what it's like, right?"

I slowed down. I wasn't trying to tell her how she felt; I just wanted to relate."So you feel alone, because nobody knows what to say. It's like trying to see in the dark," I stopped when I noticed I was back into metaphor mode, but she didn't seem to mind.

"How so?" Mami sounded genuinely interested.

"Like…you try to fumble around a touchy subject, not knowing where to go or what to say."

The smile dropped suddenly, replaced with a thoughtful deadpan. The grin moved up to her lifeless eyes; it was that look girls have where they're either sleepy or really, really content with the world. It wasn't the second one, but she didn't look terribly exhausted, either.

"It sounds like you've been through something bad, yourself," Mami said.

I told her it wasn't that interesting. That wasn't the truth at all, but then again, _I _wasn't the one contemplating a final step into the unknown beyond.

"No, tell me," she prodded, her airy words suddenly becoming pointed. "I want to know."

It wasn't like this was my turn to tell a sob story, especially since Mami's tragic backstory lasted for all of two minutes. But at the same time, I couldn't just go opening up old wounds and salting them like they were parts of an undercooked meal.

She had given me specifics, but took her time in telling them. Nobody could fault me for doing the same, right?

"It was my sister," the memories becoming words was like tearing off the world's crustiest Band-Aid. I had tried to let them come quick and fast, but instead it felt like I myself was jumping off of the pier. If I had a road I was walking on for this conversation, the road had just splintered into a million pieces. I was freefalling.

"You had a sister?" Mami sounded surprised, almost like she knew anything about me…hey, so that's what it feels like.

I went on.

"I did…she just turned, well, would have turned thirteen last month. She couldn't wait to be thirteen and all grown up and whatnot. She was a bit of a handful."

Mami must have seen in me what I was seeing in her—that sense of going-over-the-edge and losing yourself in a memory—this entire time. "What happened to her?" She asked, probably to keep me from going too far back into the past. It was a good tactic, and I mentally thanked Mami for using it.

"She jumped off a building," I said flatly. I had said it a ton of times before, so there wasn't any kind of special feeling in admitting what happened like there had been for Mami. Mami was barely able to say the actual events; for me, the poison was in the details. "Sixteenth and Mission Street, actually."

"The ColeCo Tower?"

"The ColeCo Tower," I nodded. "We didn't know why she did it. We _still _don't know. And hell, she didn't even do it by herself."

Mami's attention perked up. Her curls even seemed to bounce like a cartoon character's.

"There were, like, fifty other people," I struggled to stay away from seeing any pictures in my head. I didn't know whether or not I could take it, to be honest. "The news didn't really know how to cover it. It wasn't a cult thing, because half of the jumpers were people that worked in the building. They had families, you know?"

I expected Mami to ask what my sister was doing in the building. I hoped she didn't, though. I didn't want to explain how my parents were going through an especially-bitter argument about how my dad lost his job there, and so my sister thought that she could go and talk to his boss, who _always_ enjoyed it when she came by, and try to change things. It's not like my sister could though, what with dad getting fired for having an affair with my boss's secretary, which stemmed from—

And that's exactly what I didn't want to get into. Let's pretend I didn't just narrate that train wreck. And I hoped that Mami wouldn't ask about it.

Instead, she gave me this:

"Did they have anything on their necks?"

I did a double-take. "Come again?"

"On their necks," Mami pulled her collar down and pointed just above her shoulder blade. "The people that jumped. Did they have anything right here?" She pointed again. It was right where hickies usually go on those girls that date everybody, ever.

And how was I supposed to know? It's not like we examined the bodies. We weren't even asked to. I had a hunch why: it's probably difficult to examine a person's face post-thirty-story jump.

When I didn't respond, Mami instantly backtracked. "I'm sorry," she said in a genuine tone. "About your sister."

"It's fine," I lied. Of course it wasn't fine, but it was two years ago. Mami lost her parents way too recently for me to pretend like I was hurting as hard. "It's just hard to move past, and you never really do, but…I guess I'm trying to say that it gets easier?"

She pursed her lips. "You're saying it pretty well."

"I'm _also_ trying to tell you not to let go of that railing, because it does get easier, but then I wind up sounding like a public service announcement."

Mami eyelids fluttered. It looked like she had forgotten about the whole ordeal. Almost like isn't about to leap a good fifteen minutes ago. "You thought I was going to jump?"

"I did," I said seriously.

"Well, let's fix that!"

She stepped through the railing bars, coming safely back onto the world of the living. She held her arms out wide, almost as wide as her ear-to-ear grin. It was like the victory pose of an Olympic gymnast.

Pardon the expression.

"Ta-Da," she sang. "Really, I was just thinking about some things. But I appreciate that you tried to help me."

"No worries," I smiled. "What were you thinking about?"

If I was facing a roadblock before, the wall that came between the two of us now made the Berlin Wall look like a measly wood fence. Mami's eyes darted down, then behind me, and finally to a ring on her finger that I hadn't noticed before. It must have been worth a thousand dollars easily, what with the whole 'family of means' thing. She twisted it back and forth her, her frail fingers almost trembling under it.

If you looked at her entire figure, the ring was a focal point. It almost looked like a weight on her. If that made any sense.

Suddenly her attention flew to me with a vengeance. "How do you change yourself after something like this?"

I waited for her to try that again.

"I'm trying to get my life together again. I really am. I'm still in school, I still have my home and my health, but the rest of it will never be the same again. I need to change. But, how can I do that on my own?"

I wanted to tell her that she wasn't alone, but something about that phrase just felt disingenuous.

"There's so much about me that has to change…no, that needs to change," she said with a firm conviction. "It was supposed to be different as soon as I got out of the hospital, but it wasn't as easy as I thought, and now I'm just here.

"That's why I was hanging over the railing, if you really want to know," her words were now flowing against her will. I could tell from the way she was fumbling around saying anything too specific; her eyes were darting all over the place."I didn't know if it would have been easier if I had…

"No, that's not it. I just don't think I can make myself into what I have to be on my own. I don't know if I can ever be that person."

The entire time she was speaking, she never looked up at me. She remained fixated on her ring, came back to that ring, fiddling with it just like had I assumed. Mami saw it differently from any other piece of jewelry. It was the way someone looked at a failed test, or an overdraft bill. It was the way you looked at something that you could never run away from.

There was _obviously_ something going on here that I wasn't privy to. The name of this bizarre game was keeping away from using any details, but something else was going on with Mami's world that she hadn't told me. And there was no way for me to know what that was. For all I knew, that ring had been stolen and she needed to get it back to some evil mafia. Or maybe it was a family heirloom, and she needed to live up to her mother's legacy, whatever it was. She didn't tell me, and I didn't ask.

Mami finally went back to me. Her lifeless eyes looked like they had just woken up; she must have been lost inside her own world. "I'm sorry," she said for the umpteenth time. "This is my problem. I shouldn't be venting to someone else…

"But thank you again for coming to help me. It was very nice of you."

She smiled again, and there it was. The Mami Tomoe from school. The one that I rarely talked to…the one with the walls up.

Our conversation was over. That 'thank you' was also an ending point to this episode of our lives. To seal that point, she waved, and turned back. I had no idea where she was going, but I had a pretty good hunch that she didn't know where she was off to, either.

"You just need to rise above it," I called behind her.

The small, golden girl stopped and turned back. I wasn't sure if her walls were back up or not. But if I didn't say something, then she would feel lonely again, and she might be back at this railing when nobody else was. You don't trade death stories with a classmate and let them come back here ever again.

So, regardless of whether or not she had her defenses armed and ready, I had to say something. And, whether it was word vomit or not, she was going to listen.

"I know it's rough," I said, "And it's going to stay that way for a while. But…but your parents wouldn't want you to just be here, just...existing instead of living. So if you want to change yourself, you know you can. We're still young; we're just in high school. So you have the power to change yourself. We all do.

"You just need the courage to do it. And then you can do anything."

She played with the words for a second. I hoped she didn't think it was too corny. In my defense, I'm probably putting way too much effort into my poetry class.

"To rise above it," she repeated. Mami went distant again for a brief second. "Who told you that? It's pretty."

The truth was that somebody told it to me at my sister's funeral, but I didn't care enough then to remember the name or the face. You don't try to remember people you meet at funerals. "I kinda just came up with it," I lied. I'm hoping my Mami-esque smile sealed it.

Mami tilted her head to the side, one last time. Her hands dropped to her sides, her feet lined up together. "I'll keep that in mind," she said.

"I have to be somewhere now," she started. And when neither of us said anything, she added, "I'll see you in class," and took off after a slight bob of the curly head. I don't know if she saw me wave or not.

I never did figure out where she was going, or what she was talking about with the whole 'I need to change myself' thing, but it seemed like whatever I said worked. She missed school the next day, but for the whole week after that, she started to act like she used to. Mami took her seat at the front of the room again. She started answering questions. Her older friends started to move away, and for some reason Mami looked more tired than usual, but whenever she waved at me from across the room, I knew she was back on her game.

Mami even started hanging out with underclassmen, too. There was this girl with outrageously pink hair, and her friend with blue hair who was only a _little _bit less awkward, and the three of them were together for a three days straight.

Why three days, you ask?

Well, Mami disappeared after that. The pink and blue girls looked way too torn up to ask about it, but then they left school also. I secretly hoped that this was something to do with that whole 'change myself' thing; maybe Mami took off with her parents' money and started over somewhere fresh. Maybe she actually was going to do deal with mafia, or her mother's legacy, or whatever else you want to make up.

For the weeks after Mami Tomoe was gone, there was a nagging pull in the back of my head, saying that she might have gone back to that pier, back to the railing, and debated a soothing freefall. But then I remembered the way she acted after I told her that she could do anything, and I knew that she would be okay, wherever she was.


End file.
